The Great Migration

In the early 1900s, 90% of African-Americans lived in the Jim Crow South, bound by debt to planters in a rigidly racist and segregated world where lynching and other forms of intimidation and violence were used to enforce the social order. The first major opportunity to leave came when World War I cut off immigration from Europe and created demand for labor in the booming wartime economy at the same time as the cotton economy was starting to decline. Employ­ers needed African-American workers to fill jobs and sent agents to bring them north. At the same time, African-American newspapers like the Chicago Defender, often brought South by black sleeping car porters, were encouraging African-Americans to come north. The Pennsylvania Railroad brought 16,000 African-Americans north in the summer of 1916 alone.

Jackie Robinson, who integrated major league baseball in 1947, moved as a child with his mother from Georgia to Pasadena, CA.

What the children of slavery found in the North was not the Promised Land. Although opportunities increased and legal segre­gation did not exist, racism limited their employment, education and housing possibilities, confining them to ghettos. African-American workers were central to the economies of northern industrial cities, but they often worked in the lowest paid and most unpleasant jobs, such as janitors, assembly line workers, coal miners, longshore­men, and stokers in steel foundries. Many white union members opposed black workers being employed in their industries or joining their unions. In the late 1930s, unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations began to recruit African-American members, helping to create a black middle class in the prosperous post-World War II era. Interestingly, many of their descendants are now returning to the South in search of greater economic opportunity and a lower cost of living.